I had the opportunity to return to the Patterns and Practices Summit this year for the second time. The first time was in 2008, and they managed to plus that experience this year. All of the technology was on track, and par, for what Microsoft has been pushing toward us - 2010 being a huge year for major releases as well as out of band stuff. The presenters ......

A few weeks ago my local TFS server stopped responding to Visual Studio because of this error: “TFS Service not available: HTTP Error 503”. So this morning while I was waiting for the kids to finish getting ready for school I uninstalled (yes, I lost my existing repository) and started with scorched earth. I received a new error during this installation: ......

This month I had the opportunity to help Corey Haines host a code retreat here in Orlando. We had a great turn out and everyone seemed to have a great time. I was thinking it might help someone else out if I documented what I did to set this one up here in Orlando. Once you decide to host, or help host one here’s what you might want to consider about ......

I was poking around all of the content that is tied to this year’s Agile conference, and also browsing and selecting the sessions I want to attend next week when I realized that many of the speakers and sessions are using games to get their points across. This does reinforce the collaboration and feedback tenets quickly when you’re playing a game - ......

My coworkers setup a nice way to get the fault messages from our service layer all the way back to the client’s service proxy layer. This is what I needed to work on this afternoon. Through a series of trials and errors I finally figured this out. The confusion was how I was looking at the exception in the quick watch viewer. It appeared as though the ......

I recently was given an assignment to create a UX where a user could use the up and down arrow keys, as well as the tab and enter keys to move through a Silverlight datagrid that is going be used as part of a high throughput data entry UI. And to be honest, I’ve not trapped key codes since I coded JavaScript a few years ago. Although the frameworks ......

I recently watched a web cast that covered the idea of planning from the concept stage to the product backlog. It was the first content I had seen related to Iteration Zero and it made a lot of sense from a planning and engagement perspective where the customer is concerned. It illuminated some of the problems I’ve experienced with getting a large project ......

I was installing TFS on my local laptop last week and just got around to setting up my initial collection using the TFS Console tool and “Bang!” I received a message that told me that my local database didn’t have the full-text search option installed. I remember the option in a (long) list of options and didn’t remember fiddling with it. Whatever the ......

My son and I were out to dinner and right after we sat down, he combs the menu to locate the soda selection. Then he looks up at me and says “Looks like we get free refills here, sweet!” While we were sitting there I was thinking where that statement came from and I remember one time where he was helping to figure out the tip and saw that were we charged ......